Who Knew - Size Comparisons That Will Blow Your Mind

Written by: Jaymi Firestone

Most of the time we feel significant in size compared to things around us. We think about bugs, leaves, items of food, etc. and in comparison to our bodies, they seem small and insignificant.

This tends to cause us to render a distorted reality about the actual size of other things. Because of this, the comparisons below of normal humans to some common things will blow your mind.

Have you ever considered the size of a gorilla’s hand? The image below is what our human hands look like when compared to the hand of these great animals.

Gorillas are big. Moose are bigger though! If you’ve seen a moose with your own eyes, you know how big they are, but let’s face it, photos of moose in the wild just don’t show how massive these mammals are. Here is a great size comparison for you. They stand taller than a compact car! That’s one big animal!

And have you ever wondered what a wombat was and how big they were? Most animals that look similar fit in your hand. As you can see by this zoo keeper holding a fully grown wombat, they’re much larger than a little guinea pig. A fully grown wombat can weigh up to 77 lbs. and be close to 3 1/2 feet long.

Even though the size of these animals might have surprised you, there are some other comparisons that just might blow your mind.

We often mistake the size of things we see in history books, on tv, and in photos. Michelangelo’s statue, David, looks much like a normal person when seen in images captured on cameras, but only those who have visited the base of this work of art can understand the sheer massiveness of this sculpted and chiseled masterpiece. Maintenance often occurs to keep this statue in pristine condition, so luckily there’s an image for us to see a comparison of a normal person next to it. David stands 17 feet tall. Which is 11 feet taller than the average man!

When the Titanic was built, it was the largest ship in the world, and deemed unsinkable. The Titanic weighed more than 53,000 tons, and was nearly 900 feet long. We all know the story of what happened to this massive ship, but what we don’t realize is how puny the “Great Titanic” is when sized against the cruise ships that sail all over the world now. The average cruise ship sailing our oceans is 1,200 feet long, and weighs well above 200,000 tons.

Millions of humans may have travelled the globe on massive cruise ships, but very few have ever travelled to the moon, and the images we see of it don’t show the size very well. The moon we see in the sky every night is small, but when an astronaut is pictured or filmed on its surface, it looks enormous. So how big is the actual moon? Here’s a comparison of our moon to the United States. Who knew the US was bigger?

What’s even more mind blowing is that the sun, the center of our solar system, is about 1,300,000 times larger than Earth. It’s just a speck compared to the ball of fire that heats our days. The image below shows exactly how many Earths scientists estimate would fit inside the sun! Imagine you living on one of those little blue spheres.